You're my inspiration, part uno

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/09/sour-beer-sorbet-lambic-jenis-splendid-ice-creams-recipe.html

Not a big fan of the sweet-and-sour. Don't like bread and butter pickles. But I do love a good balance between fruitiness and tang; perhaps I simply need to expand my working definition of "sweet-and-sour".

So I'm on a quest to improve my ice cream/sorbet/ice milk/etc. skills, by making many many frozen treats. Imagining who would wanna eat sooo much ice cream and sorbet was challenging, until I realized that I have a captive audience of tasters at my beck and call; I work in skilled nursing, so there's always someone who appreciates homemade, as long as I honor dietary and texture restrictions. Et voila!

After this past week of recipe testing (Molly Moon's Blackberry Sage was the biggest hit), I have started to feel the pressure of waning fresh summer fruit. But returning to my (purported) aversion to sweet-and-sour, I was the most intrigued by Jeni Britton Bauer's sour beer/stone fruit sorbets. Above, a recipe. I made the black plum/cassis lambic version. Crazy depth of flavor, but I found myself adding a squeeze of lemon juice; it was just too sweet. However, and here's my rant of the day, the undertone of vanilla courtesy of the dearth of un-vanilla'd light corn syrup was a bit distracting. I worry that I'll have to find glucose powder and make my own...

I was at Chuck's today to pick up the lambic (Land of 1000 beers! Holla!), and my newest boyfriend Paul mentioned a beet lambic that they have. He's a very helpful young fella; ladies in yer twenties, go git him! So I had to have that lambic, despite my dislike of beets (they taste like dirt). So my next project is to find fruits and herbs that will work w/the beet lambic. Yippee! Until then, however, I shall make Kinako ice cream for my darling Kim D's patio warming party. It's a big deal, because her younger daughter has been allergic to soy and dairy, but now she's okay. Roasted soy powder and dairy, baby! Mazel tov to the Kim-Roupps!